Advisory Board/Minutes/2025-06-25

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Draft minutes. Please note that these minutes do not go through a formal approval process.

The OSMF Board of Directorshistoric had an online meeting with members of the Advisory Boardhistoric on 2025-06-25. Meeting not open to observers.


Participants

Minutes by Dorothea Kazazi.

Report from the board's 2025-05 face-to-face meeting

The OSM Foundation board members had a face-to-face board meeting on 2025-05-31 and 2025-06-01, where they talked about the long-term vision of the Foundation.

Advisory Board members were encouraged to provide advice on where OSMF should go.

On new OSMF positions

Expected 2025 OSMF expenses

GBP 500,000 of which:

  • GBP 200,000 for operations
  • GBP 200,000 for software
  • GBP 100,000 for administration

leaving us with a slight deficit, indicating that we are fully investing the donations into the platform.

Current reserves: ~ one year (GBP 500,000).

New positions

During the face-to-face meeting, the OSMF board discussed about:

  • Having an Executive Director - this is seen by the board as necessary.
  • Getting a second sysadmin is planned, to ensure the stability of the platform.

These would mean a steep increase in expenses, which could double in 1-2 years.

Budget scenarios

  • Maintain current staffing
  • Hire one of the roles.
  • Hire both roles.

On benefits from the new roles

Executive Director role:

  • Decrease the latency in board responses, from days/weeks/months to hours for non-strategic responses.

Second sysadmin:

  • Better coverage during attacks, outages, helping to keep the platform stable even after-hours.
  • Allowing better housekeeping. There are limits to what volunteers and a single sysadmin can do.

On cost of new positions and risk

  • Expected yearly expenses for both positions: ~ GBP 800,000, which is more than the reserves for one year.
  • The risk could be worth it, if there is a clear plan to replenish the reserves.

The board plans to do a large fundraising campaign. This could be helped by an Executive Director. The board hopes that the Executive Director could fund their position by running more efficient fundraising.

Advisory Board members were encouraged to provide advice on whether the plan was too bold.

Imagery

News on Bing imagery (not from the face-to-face)

  • There is a short-term solution, requiring account IDs from various editors and tools. This solution will work for at least one year, while the Microsoft team tries to find a long-term solution.
  • Mikel to post the news on community.osm.org and work with the Engineering Working Group (EWG) to collect the required IDs.

Input from Advisory Board members

  • Surprise that OSMF does not have an Executive Director.
  • A company representative, who serves on a non-profit board, participated in discussions about adding a new staff position and providing salary increases to their three employees. However, they decided to postpone these plans until the organisation becomes financially stable.
  • You might never get the money if you don't have someone dedicated to spending a significant amount of time on fundraising.

On safety and security

Concerns

  • There were conversations at the State of the Map US 2025 conference regarding how safe and protected the system is from potential attacks and the impact in case people could not edit OSM. Vandalism in Russia and Ukraine was mentioned during these discussions, as well as that there are more data leaks and cyberattacks in general.

On vandalism

  • TomTom is interested in helping with work on that topic, both with human and financial resources. They have a team which focuses on vandalism detection and comparing outputs of open tools. Two persons review issues and most of the issues seem to be due to bad editing. TomTom will schedule a call with Minh.

Additional point mentioned

  • The shared goal could help with collaboration across entities in OSM, in a similar way the 2017-2018 SnapMap vandalism through Mapbox led to collaboration on improving input tools, data quality and validation.

Other face-to-face topics

Additional OSM data output formats

Looked at publishing OSM data in additional formats and focusing on GeoParquet.

Strategic plan

No work done on the Strategic Plan for two years - an Executive Director would help with work on some of the objectives.

Fundraising campaign

The board plans to do a fundraising campaign.

Calls with Corporate sponsors

Craig Allan (Chairperson), Dani Waltersdorfer (Secretary) and Maurizio Napolitano (board) plan to have calls with all corporate sponsors through-out the year, to supplement the work of the Advisory Board.

Kirill disconnected 29 minutes after start.

Minh Nguyễn's update on his work as the OSM core software development facilitator

Minh Nguyễn (OSM core software development facilitator) provided an update on his work.

Related: 2025-04 blog post: Meet the new Core Software Development facilitator

Self-introduction

  • Started work as the Core Software Development Facilitator in April.
  • Lives in California, joining from NYC.
  • Involved with the OSM community for many years.
  • Former OSM US board member.
  • Involved in various other things as a hobbyist.

OSM core software development facilitator role

  • Facilitating the communication between different groups who are working on the software and the community.
  • Longer range planning where we want to take projects such as the osm.org API, some of the tools around that and the tools around producing and distributing the planet files.
  • People have been reaching out to Minh about software development in general.

This position is funded for two years through the Sovereign Tech Agency.

Roadmap for core software

Minh is working with various groups and maintainers on the roadmap for core software and on the hiring plan to open a new position for core software.

The roadmap focuses on:

  • Community health. Examples:
    • better tools for combating spam and dealing with moderation needs, which takes up a lot of time of the OWG and community members.
    • providing a place for tools managing feedback from notes, e.g. querying based on particular criteria. There are some ongoing efforts on that.
  • Developer experience
    • the current scope of funding, time frame and resources are probably not enough for anything groundbreaking, such as evolving the OSM data model. In the meantime, we could mitigate some related problems.
    • other data formats - there are efforts from Local Chapters, which we would like to make more discoverable.
  • Legal compliance
  • Operational sustainability
    • use automation to reduce the time needed to produce a planet file, which currently takes about a week, and make it more reliable.

Goals

  • The roadmap will initiate conversations on what matters most.
  • People can approach OSM and perceive our software development projects as a coherent functional effort.

Other points mentioned during discussion

  • The focus areas of the roadmap are not mutually exclusive.
  • Not all of the areas of the roadmap above are within the scope of the Sovereign Tech funding, but they are still important to the community and the ecosystem.
  • Thanks were expressed to Kirill and the Microsoft Open Data team for their work on improving the osm.org website.
    • Post meeting note: See their January Advisory Board meeting presentation here.
  • Minh is focusing on identifying blocks, facilitating communications, rather than being the first to respond to everything, and to help people work as a team.
  • It is hard to get everyone aligned on the project.

On features than need resources

  • Note tracking.
  • Helping the community track the data changes - we are very dependent on third-party tools, which in turn depend on the planet and minutely diffs distribution, which takes about a week.
  • There's a need to potentially consolidate some efforts, so that it's easier to produce additional distributions (e.g. augmented diffs). It's also challenging, because only a couple people understand how any of that works.

On communication

Minh posts monthly updates about the work done on the osm.org website.

Minh shared his contact details and encouraged Advisory Board members to contact him if they are interested in any of the areas above and can provide resources or advice and guidance.

Meeting adjourned 51 minutes after start.

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